Also on Mediabistro

A study at Cornell University School of Industrial Labor Relations found that job seekers exposed to bad news about a prospective employer were much less attracted to it than those who only heard neutral information. Additionally, job seekers who heard negative information about a company were less likely to apply for jobs there.

A Bad-News, Good-News Situation

What this means for you, an opportunity-seeking job searcher, is if you do apply to a company going through a bit of a rough patch, you could be competing with a smaller-than-usual group of fellow applicants.

The upshot: Looking for a new job at a company that’s having a spot of bad press can be a smart job strategy. You can use the shortage of applicants to your advantage, do your research into what the bad news means for the company, and develop talking points about how you can help the company going forward.

Do Your Research

Of course, doing your research on an employer is an essential part of preparing for an interview. But when a company is undergoing distress because of some bad news, you’ve got to be more diligent than usual.

Become friends with Google News, and use it to search recent coverage on the company. Make sure you have a firm grasp on what news has been reported, who the players are and what is involved. Pay close attention to what the company itself says about what’s going on.

Look for the Silver Lining

There’s an old saying that in Chinese, the word “crisis” also means “opportunity.”

That’s now been refuted, but there is something to the notion that how a company handles bad news is ultimately more important that the bad news itself.

Do your research to learn what the company is doing not just to put this situation behind it, but to learn from it. After all, you are applying to work at the company that will emerge after this setback, not the one that created it.

Below are a few employers on our job board that, while having had a recent brush with bad news, are still amazing companies, and are hiring now.

The Bad News: The Swedish publishing conglomerate, publisher of Saveur and Working Mother, among others, falls victim to e-mail spoofing when hackers breached the outgoing CEO’s email and sent instructions to accounts payable to make two fraudulent wire transfers in the amount of $1.5 million each.

The Good News: The company was able to stop and reverse the second transfer. Internal investigations found there was no evidence of embezzlement by an insider, or theft of employees’ personal information.

The Bad News: Meredith Corporation, the publishing company behind such publications as Parents and Martha Stewart Living, closes More magazine after 19 years of publication, saying it has decided to cease publication in order to “invest and align its resources against more profitable activities.”